Seamus Heaney Dies: Irish Poet And Nobel Prize Winner Dead At 74; How Did He Die?

Seamus Heaney, said to have been the keeper of language, codes, essence as a people" for the Irish, has died. He was admitted to Blackrock Clinic in Dublin for a procedure, but died Friday morning before undergoing it due to a short illness. He was 74. Heaney was born in Northern Ireland and moved to Dublin later in his life. He received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995, and was known as the most important Irish poet since William Butler Yeats. President Michael D. Higgins, also a published poet, said in a statement about the poet's death that Heaney's contributions to Ireland and humanity were immense.

"As tributes flow in from around the world, as people recall the extraordinary occasions of the readings and the lectures, we in Ireland will once again get a sense of the depth and range of the contribution of Seamus Heaney to our contemporary world, but what those of us who have had the privilege of his friendship and presence will miss is the extraordinary depth and warmth of his personality," he said. "A courtesy that enabled him to carry with such wry Northern Irish dignity so many well-deserved honours from all over the world."

Heaney was born April 13, 1939 on a farm in County Derry. He often reflected on his upbringing in his poetry, which began gaining popularity in the 1960s. He graduated from Queen's University Belfast and later went on to teach in Dublin as well as the U.S. His collection of works include "Death of a Naturalist," which contained one of his more popular works entitled "Digging;" The Spirit Level," "District and Circle" and "Bog Poems." He often wrote about the sectarian violence in the British province of Ulster, decrying the British oppression in Northern Ireland. He never wrote in support of the violence purported by the Irish Republican Army, and instead wrote from both sides of the conflict.

Heaney published a book of his lectures the year he won the Nobel Prize called "The Redress of Poetry." In it, he wrote of the translation of real life into literature. "It is in the space between the farmhouse and the playhouse that one discovers what I've called 'the frontier of writing,' the line that divides the actual conditions of our daily lives from the imaginative representations of those conditions in literature," Heaney said in the text. Heaney was to deliver an address at Linen Hall Library next Tuesday, and at Amnesty International's ambassador of conscience award, named after a poem he wrote for the organization in 1985, next month.